1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the management of reference data like bibliographic data relating to a computer-readable document, e.g., a text document.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some types of text documents, in particular scientific papers or the like, contain a large amount of reference data like bibliographic data, footnotes, hyperlinks, etc. With some text documents inputting, handling, and editing the reference data requires a large portion of the time and work needed to create the text document. In some cases, the handling of bibliographic data is even more time consuming than generating the text data itself.
With word processing application programs, it is known to insert bibliographic data of every reference document or footnote by typing every reference separately. The bibliographic data is then treated and stored by the word processing program as text data having a different character font and format. Most word processing programs are able to correctly handle the position and order of the bibliographic data when the text data is edited. The writing and editing of the bibliographic data, however, is awkward and time consuming.
Therefore, it was proposed to create a separate database for bibliographic data. When a new reference was inserted in the text document, a reference field pointed to a respective entry in the database. With such a separate database writing and editing the bibliographic data was facilitated, in particular if references were cited several times in the same document. Moreover, the format of the citations was determined centrally in the database and so did not need to be input separately for every new citation.
If the text document was copied to a different storage medium, for example the disk memory of a laptop computer, however, the problem arose that the bibliographic database, which was stored as a separate data file was not available on the storage medium, on which the text document had been copied. Therefore, the user of the laptop computer was able to edit the text data, but not the bibliographic data.